


Analysis of Palace Holders in Persona 5

by Megpie71



Category: Persona 5
Genre: Analysis, Character Analysis, Gen, Metafiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-03
Updated: 2021-02-03
Packaged: 2021-03-14 19:13:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 6,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29176224
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Megpie71/pseuds/Megpie71
Summary: Meta-fiction, analysing the various palace holders in Persona 5 and what we're told about them.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 13





	1. Suguru Kamoshida

**Author's Note:**

> This is my own work analysing the various Palace Holders in Persona 5. I'm largely using the information we're given about the characters in the original game (this does not cover Persona 5 Royal) rather than anything meta-textual released by Atlus or the various creators. 
> 
> I hold the opinion analysis released by creators after the publication of the initial game is not actually "word of God", but rather, just as much fan-content as anything fans come up with, since it's either created or released in the context of a wider fandom demand for such things. This also applies to things like deleted scenes, early drafts, and so on.

Suguru Kamoshida is probably the most well-thought-out of the various antagonists in the game. All of his actions make internal sense for the type of character he is supposed to be - starting with the decision to leak the protagonist's criminal record to the student gossip network. I can't really imagine a timeline where Kamoshida is carrying out his assaults (both physical and sexual) on the students and he _doesn't_ leak the protagonist's record. It's pretty clear the whole reason the school is taking the protagonist on in the first place is _directly related to Kamoshida's activities_ \- namely, the assault on Ryuji Sakamoto which left Ryuji with a damaged leg. This is a scandal in the making, and it should have been a major one. As it is... well, the school covered it up (for now) but I suspect there's a certain amount of unease in amongst the senior faculty and governors, and the principal has been told to look for ways of getting the school a better reputation which don't rely wholly on the actions of one unreliably violent volleyball coach. The idea of "rehabilitating" a criminal is one which could provide a bit of kudos for the school, and I'm pretty sure they took a good long look at the protagonist's record before they agreed to take him on. My guess is the protagonist's academic record is one of those ones which is full of "X has great potential, but little application" and "could do better if he just applied himself" and so on, and no record of aggressive or violent behaviour at school whatsoever. "Scare him straight" and it should have been a shoo-in for positive press.

I'm not sure whether we're ever given a canon age for Kamoshida, but I think he's fairly young - maybe about mid-twenties at most. The Olympics he got the medal in might have been the 2012 ones (the game is set in 2016) but he got pushed out of the Olympic team by someone with a bit more talent (or possibly someone who was simply younger and / or less difficult to deal with) and was offered the teaching spot at Shujin as compensation - "old boy does good" stuff. He most likely doesn't have much in the way of actual teaching training (or a vocation for teaching in the first place). This would explain why Ms Kawakami is actively modelling "good teacher behaviour" at Kamoshida in the interchange between the two of them we see at the beginning of the game (pointing out to him it isn't good teacher behaviour to say "I don't want this child to be attending school at all" - teachers are supposed to want all their pupils to attend, and hopefully to do well), and it would explain a lot of the reassurance and praise he's given in the volleyball rally scenes - the narrative the staff have apparently been given is "Kamoshida-kun doesn't quite know what he's supposed to be doing yet - that's why the Incident with Sakamoto occurred - and we have to teach him how to be a good teacher". Kamoshida was probably the sporting "golden boy" during his years at the school (we're told he was a Shujin alumnus) and he continues getting the "golden boy" treatment while he's teaching there.

But the end result is we have someone who thinks he's entitled to say who does and doesn't belong in Shujin (and who chooses his candidates in a rather childish manner). Kamoshida's attitude toward the protagonist is very much akin to a cuckoo chick with another bird in the nest with him - he sees the protagonist as something directly in competition with himself for attention and resources, and therefore something to be starved out and ejected as soon as possible. Kamoshida also acts in ways which really don't give a particularly mature estimate of his age - such as the leaking of the protagonist's record (to the _student_ gossip network - Kamoshida's use of the student network as his primary manipulative tool is another pointer to him not being too far removed from high school age himself), which is very much something he'd do in order to sabotage the whole situation. The idea is the protagonist is supposed to be a bit of an academic drifter, something Kamoshida clearly associates with being a social butterfly. The notion Kamoshida apparently has is the social isolation being caused by his actions will cause the protagonist to stop trying academically, stop showing up to school, and become a delinquent in truth. With Kamoshida's rather limited supplies of empathy and imagination, this is what he thinks he'd do in the same situation, so he's pretty sure it would work (and look, it's almost succeeded in working with Sakamoto, so it's a tried and trusted tactic). 

Ann comments that "outside of school, Kamoshida is a pathetic loser" - and this is very much likely to be the case. Kamoshida's version of masculinity, as portrayed by his Shadow (and increasingly, by himself) is one where friendship and loyalty are things to be exploited in others - a "real man" is a rugged individual, entirely separate from others (an unusual stance for someone who participated in and coaches a team sport). Bravery (of the "throw yourself at your opponent thoughtlessly" variety) is to be praised, but exploited for one's own purposes, while caution and forethought are both to be despised. Respect is something he deserves without question - Kamoshida's Shadow becomes furious when the protagonist (who has no reason to either know who he is or to care about it at that point in the game) doesn't show him the proper amount of deference in their first meeting. Kamoshida's Shadow says "nobody needs to achieve results" aside from him - everyone else needs to fail, in order for him to succeed. Kamoshida's Shadow says inside his Castle, everyone wants to be loved by him (which stands in sharp contrast to the way outside, he's unable to get the girl he's interested in without essentially resorting to threats and blackmail). Inside the school, Kamoshida is able to believe he's the king of the castle. Outside of the school... he's a washed-up former Olympian who peaked early, with no other saleable skills, who was given a coaching job as a way of keeping him out of trouble, and he's probably holding onto the job at this point by virtue of powerful connections which are much more likely to be bonds of family than friendship (in at least one of my fanfic universes, Kamoshida is the brother-in-law of the head of the SIU).

The main saving grace for most of the players in the whole thing is this: as a relatively young predator, Kamoshida's strategies aren't yet evolved enough to be less than glaringly obvious. He puts the bruises in visible places; the rumours about him are already flying; and his approaches to Ann Takamaki are obviously not appreciated (if he were older and wiser, he'd be making it look like she was coming on to him). I strongly suspect even in a world without a metaverse, someone like Kamoshida would have a limited amount of time left to play King of the Castle at Shujin - there's just too much of what he's doing which is too obvious to far too many people. The principal may be under pressure to keep him in the role by powerful forces outside the school (e.g. a powerful brother-in-law who has at least some control over police investigations and prosecutions), but at some point, a tipping-point is going to be reached. Of course, what would happen in such a case is he'd be quietly asked to resign, promised a good reference should he apply somewhere else and take his scandals-in-the-making there, and the whole thing would be covered up... until eventually he mis-stepped to the point where there's no chance of covering things up, or the chain of his victims became so long and obvious there was no way of covering it up either. (The analogy I'm thinking of here is those Catholic priests who were shuffled sideways every time their sexual scandals threatened to come out). 

(The majority of this section was originally posted as a comment at <https://archiveofourown.org/works/21359908/chapters/57315379>)


	2. Ichiryusai Madarame

Madarame actually is an artist - but a con artist rather than a visual artist. He's been running two long cons on the Japanese art world, as well as running a long con on Yusuke Kitagawa, but he's reaching the point where all of these cons have to be wound up one way or another. 

The con on Yusuke has the slightly longer lifespan, but even there, it's definitely reaching its final months. Yusuke has proved to have artistic talent, which has won him scholarships and given Madarame an unexpected source of revenue and a means to prolong both his cons further than he otherwise would have. On the one hand, this means Madarame can keep more of the money to himself and not have to spend it on Yusuke; but on the other hand, it also means people other than Madarame are seeing Yusuke's artwork on the regular. It is highly likely Yusuke has received comments from his teachers at school saying he should "stop imitating Madarame's style so much"; and given there's a high likelihood Yusuke is going to try and enter university on a fine arts scholarship, there's going to be even _more_ scrutiny of Yusuke's work... and the "coincidence" of Yusuke's default style matching so strongly with Madarame's most recent one is going to undergo even more investigation. There's also the profound disadvantage of Yusuke being the rather straightforward and blunt person he is- he's very much likely to tell people he's not imitating Madarame at all - if anything the imitation runs the other way. It only takes one person to believe Yusuke, and the whole of Madarame's recent history comes up for examination, at which point, at least part of the second con (on the Japanese art world) will be exposed. Yusuke was always going to be discarded or cut loose in some way, regardless of how much the relationship between the two of them (mentor/student; father/son) fed Madarame's ego. It's likely the story regarding the breach would have been either "more in sorrow than in anger" or "fly, be free", and Yusuke would have eventually been written off as "another student who just couldn't stop copying his mentor's style". 

(Madarame wouldn't care what happened to Yusuke after he cuts him loose. Yusuke can sink or swim, it's all one to Madarame. Yusuke knows spreading the true story just makes Yusuke look vindictive and malicious - or if he doesn't, he'll soon learn).

It's possible Madarame might have picked up and taken himself and the Saiyuri off to another location in Japan, or even another country (although this would require establishing himself somewhere else, and would require patronage) to pick up the con on the art world from there. But I suspect the natural limitation of his more lucrative long con on the art world is the saturation point of the market for "genuine" fake Saiyuris - there's only so long he can carry on selling them before two of his marks meet, and realise they've both been conned, at which point the story starts to leak out. He's been running this con hard for about ten to fifteen years now, and I suspect the market has pretty much reached the point where finding appropriate buyers is getting to be harder and harder. So it's time for Madarame to "retire" and either figure out another con on the Japanese art world, or to find another field to run his con in. It really depends on how much of the ego supply he needed and how often as to whether he would have tried to find another con, another field, or whether he genuinely would have "retired" into relative obscurity.

As a visual artist, Madarame's main talent is most likely to be that he's a gifted copyist - he's been able to create "genuine" fake Sayuris for years, and this has probably been his main artistic output. He probably also, in the earlier years of the secondary con on the art world (the one where he's established himself as a "gifted" artist with "multiple styles") created a few paintings of his own in imitation of the styles of his students. I suspect, however, he gave this up, as he realised his own works were never the more appreciated ones, while "his" works created by his students were much more popular and authentic, although none of them reached the heights of popularity or saleability reached by "Sayuri".


	3. Junya Kaneshiro

Kaneshiro is the first opponent the Phantom Thieves run into who isn't likely to have burned out his particular scheme inside two to three years from the timeframe of the game. 

Kaneshiro is cunning; he's intelligent enough to know how to get things set up in a way that makes him hard to trace by the police and other investigative forces; and while he's definitely greedy and out for the money, he also has enough control of his greed to ensure he's playing a long game rather than a short term one. I suspect at least part of his racket would have involved a lot of money laundering via various cash enterprises, so he could start investing his funds to make money for himself legitimately (and I suspect the unravelling of his schemes would have provided a lot of employment for tax officials; his main offences when it came to sentencing would almost certainly have involved defrauding the state on a rather large scale). He's intelligent enough to pick marks who are inexperienced enough they're going to fall for the initial pitch (of an easy "part time job"); naive enough not to recognise the money he's offering is too good to be true for the work they're being offered; immature enough they're not going to be willing to take the hit to the ego involved in admitting they were fooled, conned, or blackmailed; and also scared enough of the consequences of revealing their own stupidity to their parents and the authorities they're going to have a lot of difficulty extricating themselves from his clutches before they've been bled dry. High school students are ideal marks for his sort of scheme, because even if the authorities catch on to the most obvious part of it (using high-schoolers as drug mules), any action they take is just going to deliver Kaneshiro a bunch more "rebellious" teenagers out to "stick it to the man" by playing this high stakes game for kicks. Through the kids, he can bleed the parents at one remove, and even if the parents find out about the blackmail and extortion, he can play on the idea of parents not being willing to risk the loss of face involved in having their kid outed to the police as drug mules to get money from them. 

So long as he plays it cautiously, doesn't succumb to the temptation of openly living the champagne and celebrity lifestyle, and keeps a good close eye on his minions, Kaneshiro can conceivably keep this scheme going for decades. There were two ways the authorities were likely to be able to crack it - either by tracking his money laundering activities (which would have happened through the tax officials, and which would probably have been stymied by Kaneshiro moving funds off-shore, using shell corporations and so on); or by the police inserting a mole at the bottom of things and playing a long game themselves. Of the two, the money laundering would have been more likely to yield dividends - and it's likely at least part of what Kaneshiro was attempting to purchase by subscribing to the Conspiracy was a either long-term inability on the part of the Japanese tax officials to look into such things, or a willingness on the part of these officials to look the other way.

Kaneshiro's main (and indeed, only) weakness is his awareness of his own origins. He knows he came from nothing, and he's rather pathetically aware of just how easy it would be for him to wind up back where he started. It's part of what drives his greed - he sees money as security and status.


	4. Futaba Sakura / Medjed

From the evidence supplied in canon, it's clear Futaba Sakura is intended to be read as autistic - more specifically, as an autistic savant type who specialises in hacking. I would suspect like a lot of autistic kids, Futaba has spent a lot of her life being told what she thinks about things is either factually incorrect, socially inappropriate, or just outright wrong - and thus, like a lot of autistic kids, she's also susceptible to being told what she _should_ think about things in order to be "normal". This is why the whole "it's your fault your mother died" thing worked powerfully enough on her to create a Palace - it was reinforced not just by her family, but by anonymous outsiders who conceivably didn't have a stake in anything. The main thing the Phantom Thieves did for Futaba was supply a counter-stimulus which broke her out of a mental fugue state - they started asking things like "well, what did you do that was so bad?" and offering some perspective along the lines of "a kid wanting attention from their parent isn't a Bad Thing". Her more major problem is her rampaging social phobia, which is something which gets tackled in her confidant line.

Medjed is supposed to be an analogue for "Anonymous" - and once you know the history of "Anonymous", you start realising Medjed was never going to be the threat it was hyped up to be. The reaction of the Phantom Thieves to Medjed was actually meant to supply information to the Tokyo Conspiracy about the Phantom Thieves more than anything else. Medjed was a paper tiger, and _it was never meant to be anything else_. Medjed was supposed to flush out the Phantom Thieves in response to a purely illusionary bogeyman. 

The way the story runs in-game, Medjed started as a "hackers for justice" collective, but lately it's deteriorated into just a "hackers for themselves" group, and this parallels the story of the "Anonymous" hacker collective. "Anonymous" got their start when a bunch of 4-chan regulars went to an anti-scientology protest wearing "V" masks (from the "V for Vendetta" movie) and liked the sense of being both visible enough to make an impact on a social institution (the church of Scientology), while still being anonymous enough to escape any consequences. It sparked the notion of being "hackers for justice", but they quickly ran into the big problem inherent in this sort of thing: if they wanted to be anonymous in order to escape the negative consequences of their actions, they have to _remain_ anonymous and avoid the positive consequences as well. (Think of Ryuji's behaviour from about August through October, as he's busy wanting to use "being a Phantom Thief" as a way of getting girls - this is what quite a few people were wanting to do with "Anonymous"). It also meant they had to be at least somewhat accountable for their actions and views, which was never going to be a particularly attractive option to the sort of person who thinks 4-chan is a great place to hang out in the first place (at least part of the attraction of anonymous message boards is there's no way of linking what you say on them back to you as a person, so you can be free to be as "outrageous" and "edgy" - or in other words, bigoted, nasty and hateful - as you like, with no real consequences[1]). A lot of the more outwardly high-minded members of "Anonymous" wound up dropping out due to lack of ego supply, leaving behind the more amoral members of the group who were basically hacking for profit, revenge, malice or purely for "the lulz". When "Anonymous" had a lot of members, it had a lot more ability to do things; when it lost members, it lost effective power, and eventually melted away into nothing. 

(Side note: it's worth noting the dangerous hacking groups in the real world generally aren't freelancers working for "justice" or anything like that. They're paid professionals, usually hired by a nation's intelligence organisations, and they do this for a living rather than as a crusade. They're also not likely to do something as obvious or stupid as targeting an entire nation's economic infrastructure, because their employers are aware this breaks the game board, rather than winning the game).

In the same way, in the game, Medjed is basically a distraction put up by the Tokyo Conspiracy to see whether the Phantom Thieves will rise to the bait. The idea of a big scary hacker collective is all very well, but I suspect the execution of their "Purge" would have been rather anti-climactic. There would have been a certain amount of Y2K syndrome involved as well - the smart companies would have been hardening their systems to intrusion, tightening up firewalls, and so on. Which means if Medjed had held their "Purge", it would have run into the various counter-measures set up to deal with such things, and effectively fallen flat. I suspect there was probably as much stress in the Conspiracy about "oh gods, we're going to have to actually _DO_ this" toward the second week of August as there was for the Phantom Thieves for "oh gods, we need to prevent this". (My guess: the "Phantom Thieves" would have won either way, purely because the Conspiracy wouldn't have bothered to try and actually set up a "purge", but would have said "the Phantom Thieves defeated us" on the Medjed site regardless of the result, and moved on to the next stage of their plan, which was setting up Kunikazu Okumura to die at the hands of the Phantom Thieves). 

[1] My principal objection to "chan culture" is the way it destroys the very roots of the notion of accountability, by ensuring there's plausible deniability for even the most outrageous claims - they're being done "for the lulz", to get a reaction... or at least, you can't prove they _aren't_. Nobody _really_ thinks that way... (or so they claim), and thus the most hateful, nasty, depersonalising and vicious points of view are just aired as matters of course, and the "cool" thing to do is to believe nobody actually believes what they're saying. I mean, leaving aside the fact being nasty to get a reaction isn't a particularly good way to be behaving in the first place, it means ideas like authenticity, sincerity and integrity get treated as being juvenile, infantile, entirely too naive for words, and nobody should be _expected_ to trust anything anyone else is saying. It's a very anti-social attitude (in the sense it actively discourages social behaviours such as trust, group formation, empathy etc) to encourage, and it is hardly surprising a lot of extremely anti-social rhetoric is now springing from the seeds sown on various -chan boards.


	5. Kunikazu Okumura

Okumura is, aside from the "commissioning mental shutdowns from Shido" part of things, a pretty standard late-stage capitalist businessman. He over-works his staff (particularly the workers at his burger chain), he feeds them to the machinery of late-stage capitalism as human sacrifices to Mammon, and he regards everyone who isn't him as a disposable, fungible asset which can be used to further his goals - including his daughter. However, he was supposedly reaching a personal "end-stage" where he was wanting to leave the business world and move into politics, at which point his characterisation breaks down and becomes unbelievable. 

The sort of business tycoon who goes into politics is usually a confirmed narcissist, and they've usually been making a name for themselves in the media beforehand as a bit of a business celebrity (I'm fully expecting Elon Musk to want to try for President of the USA some day, even though he's not US-born; Donald Trump was precisely this sort of business celebrity before he started chasing political office; in Australia we have Clive Palmer who covers a lot of the same territory). So you'd expect to hear a lot more about "Kunikazu Okumura" before the point where he's set up as a target on the Phansite. As it is, while we start hearing about Big Bang Burger, and the incidents involving the rival companies to Big Bang Burger, fairly early on in the whole game, we don't hear a word about the CEO of Big Bang Burger until September - October. This is one of the more obvious errors in the writing for the game.

Of course, once you realise Okumura is the sort of person who is one of those corporate narcissists, the whole business with setting up his business opponents for mental shut-downs and psychotic breakdowns makes a lot more sense. It makes sense he wouldn't have the confidence in his own product to prop him up, because this is completely alien to the narcissistic personality type. The skulduggery and assassination efforts and so on really make sense in the context of a narcissistic CEO. Which, of course, means he's an excellent mark himself for the sort of corporate and political sociopath Masayoshi Shido represents. 

The problem Okumura posed for the Conspiracy should have been this: he was too likely to talk to the media about how he was "blessed by the gods" or something similar. Okumura would have been indiscreet if his indiscretion seemed likely to get him the narcissistic supply he needed. He had to be silenced, because he was too likely to let the cat out of the bag before Shido was ready for things to be known. He had to be steered away from politics (which, unfortunately, is hard to do for these sorts of players - they like the media attention which comes with politics, they like the attention - both positive and negative - which comes from being a prominent figure in the public eye) because he would have inevitably set himself up as a competitor to Masayoshi Shido, and he would have expected Shido to step out of the way for him when Okumura wanted the top job (and he _would_ have wanted the top job; part of the dissatisfaction Clive Palmer felt with Australian Federal politics was he wasn't allowed to be Prime Minister - instead he was a rather minor cross-bench MP; Donald Trump was only ever campaigning for the job of President - he didn't want to serve his time as a senator, a congressman or a state governor before becoming President; likewise, Kunikazu Okumura would not have accepted just being an ordinary Diet member, he would have wanted the job of Prime Minister). Unfortunately, there was too little effort actually spent on characterising Kunikazu Okumura (as opposed to "Big Bang Burger") correctly in the earlier stages of the game, so what we get is a very cardboard narcissist instead.


	6. Sae Niijima

Sae is, I suspect, supposed to be a study in how a Palace can be created through natural forces - the logic is supposed to be Sae herself doesn't have the same sort of underlying distortion in her personality the other palace holders (aside from Futaba) do, but rather her circumstances put her under enough pressure for her thinking to start to distort anyway. She's shown to be in a less-than-pleasant situation at the beginning of the game, with hints she's being rather discreetly sexually harassed by her boss (with strong hints she won't be allowed to move on or up career-wise unless she submits and permits, so to speak). She's under pressure to resolve the Phantom Thieves case as soon as possible, and isn't aware she's dealing with not one, but two moles in her camp (first Goro Akechi, who is part of the conspiracy which effectively created the Phantom Thieves; secondly her sister Makoto, who's one of the Phantom Thieves[2]) who are working to sabotage her progress. She's probably developing her Palace by about June, at the point where Makoto is being pressured into chasing down the Phantom Thieves for Kobayakawa, and essentially becomes a pawn in the wider game.

Both female Palace holders are essentially excused from responsibility for their distortions (which is sexist - benign sexism is still sexism), and instead the responsibility is put on outside forces. I'd argue in Sae's case, at least, the core distortion was not externally imposed - her core distortion, which is her perception of life as a game to be won, and her insistence she has to be the winner, is something which is born from within herself. Throughout her depiction in the game, this is not changed - and the clue in the fact she doesn't actually have a genuine Change of Heart is the way she basically shifts from being a prosecutor in a corrupt system to being a defense attorney in the same corrupt system. Sae still believes (very strongly) in the game, and she believes she both _can_ and _has to_ win the game. All she's done is raised the difficulty level of the competition; the essential arrogance at the base of her personality is finding a bit more expression through her choice to be a defender opposed to the corrupt system rather than a prosecutor with the system behind her. She's still on the same football field, she's just changed ends.

Sae's Palace is the one most likely to reappear, should the Metaverse re-surface.

[2] Speaking of which... I cannot see things "returning to normal" in the Niijima household after November. Sae has had a very personal betrayal from Makoto; Makoto has been betrayed by Sae in a very personal way as well, and I cannot see the pair of them entirely reconciling unless some very uncomfortable discussions are held - and neither of them are keen on uncomfortable discussions when _they're_ the one being made uncomfortable. I can see the pair of them attempting to paper over the cracks, and pretend nothing has changed. I can't see them resolving the underlying problems, which will resurface through acidic comments from one to the other, and eventually boil up into a deadly cold argument which will inevitably result in Makoto either leaving under her own steam, or Sae throwing her out.


	7. Masayoshi Shido

While there's a lot of work done to outwardly characterise Masayoshi Shido as the sort of political sociopath with narcissistic tendencies who would see the country as his ship to steer, and the world as his to destroy, there isn't enough done to actually give his character much depth. We never learn why he thinks he's the best person to lead Japan, we're just told he does. We never learn why he was attempting to molest a woman back in the protagonist's hometown, we just know he was. We never find out why he abandoned Goro Akechi and his mother, we're just told this happened. It's implied he's doing all these things for the same reason a dog licks its genitals: purely because he can. This makes him a very cardboard character, and it inevitably detracts from his ability to be genuinely and believably menacing as a villain. If there was some evidence of an underlying reason for his drive toward power, a reason why he thought becoming the supreme Japanese politician would be the fulfilment of his life's dream or something similar, I'd be much happier dealing with him as an opponent.

There's also evidence Shido is starting to undergo what I call "dictator decay" - the refusal to admit any potential equals or any potential challengers for your power which afflicts all long-term dictators, and which tends to be an end-stage manifestation of dictatorship - even before he's reached the office of Prime Minister. This is obvious in his decision to destroy the head of the SIU (presumably for letting Sae Niijima get an interview with the Phantom Thief they caught - or at least, this is the motive we're supposed to infer for his removal) at the point where the "protagonist's suicide" plot element is happening. "Dictator Decay" also gives a vaguely valid characterisation reason for him and Goro Akechi swapping monologues at each other about their dastardly plotting as well (seriously, I understand the scene has to happen so the _player_ knows who they're up against, but it is the clumsiest piece of writing in the whole game... very "As You Know, Your Father, The King" in style). Again, it's not explained why this is the case, we're just told to accept it is. 

It's implied Shido's main ability as the man at the core of the conspiracy was his ability to get people on side and talk them into believing he could be useful for them just like they could be useful for him. The problem is, again, there's very little evidence of this. His cronies and lieutenants seem to be very much convinced they're gaining something from his exploitation of them (Ooe gains access to the role of Transport Minister; the television station chief gains some high ratings for a particular piece of sensationalist television, but there's ample evidence to suggest they're not going to see the rewards of Shido's reign as Prime Minister, because he's busy cleaning house already (hence the destruction of the head of the SIU, and the planned destruction of Goro Akechi; Goro definitely isn't going to survive past the election if Shido has his way). I have no idea how he was going to get rid of his "Cleaner" or how Shido was planning to disentangle himself from the Yakuza - possibly he wasn't. 

To be honest, I find the whole "Tokyo Conspiracy" and "Shido was the baddie all along" plot-lines to be the least convincing parts of the story of Persona 5. They're very much handed to the player in a sort of "take it or leave it" fashion, and there's not much done about building up any kind of depth of characterisation for Shido, despite the fact we're seeing him as "a politician commenting on public affairs" on a regular basis from the beginning of the game. Which is a pity, because it might have been interesting to see him portrayed as one of the same generation of young and up-coming politicians who came in as part of the group Yoshida was a member of - a man who basically either went full negative-chronic Paladin ("I must destroy this country in order to save it from the depths of depravity it has fallen into") and who actually does genuinely see himself as Doing Right when he sets out to dethrone the current government and create his own political party[3]; or a political opportunist who turned his coat when offered a chance by another party, and who has been sabotaging his rivals all the way along. As it stands, however, he is the least plausible and believable of the various antagonists we're offered (and I'm including the Holy Grail in this list - the idea you're going to eventually be challenging the physical manifestation of the sloth and lethargy of the overall population is something which is being hinted toward throughout the entire game, as you slowly uncover the "seven deadly sins" themes). 

In contrast to the amount of work put into creating believable characters in the earliest three palace holders, the latter three appear to suffer from being rushed. There hasn't been the same level of thought put into the motivations for the latter palace holders - instead, we're given their outward motivations (Okumura wants to go into politics, Sae wants to win, Shido wants to run Japan) but we're never really given a glimpse of the reasons why they want these things. We can see Kamoshida wants to be loved by everyone because he thinks he's entitled to it as a reward for being a "winner"; we recognise Madarame wants wealth because he hates the idea of being a poor artist; we're given a clear explanation for why Kaneshiro becomes ridiculously greedy in his "I came from nothing" shtick. Even with Futaba, we're able to understand why she wants her palace to vanish - she doesn't want to be tormented by the ghost of her mother any more, but she's so caught up in her fugue state of thinking she can't move on (this is actually a pretty neat use of the known autistic difficulty with task switching, by the way!). By contrast... why does Okumura want to go into politics? He just does. Why does Sae Niijima want to win so badly she's willing to cheat? She just does. Why does Masayoshi Shido want to be Prime Minister of Japan? Because he just does. It's as though, having got the player through the first four palaces, the writers ran out of steam, and settled for the presumption the player wasn't going to give up at this point, but would play through to the end regardless of how superficial the plot was in the latter stages of the game. 

[3] This would tie in nicely with the other similarities to Yaldabaoth which are planted throughout the boss fight with Shadow Shido - we would have two entities which are very much convinced they are only doing what the people want, need, and expect.


End file.
